New app Karma brings food waste battle to UK

A new app could eat into London’s food waste problem by offering a 50 per cent discount in restaurants, cafés and grocery stores.

Karma has taken over Sweden since launching in 2016, with more than 250,000 users and 1,000 businesses signed up across 35 towns and cities. Now the tech firm is serving up the app to Londoners with more than 50 restaurants already on the menu, including Michelin-starred Aquavit, nine locations from French bistro Aubaine and Arket, the in-store restaurant for H&M’s latest concept store.

Karma-drop-in

Magpie, the new restaurant from the team behind Hackney’s Michelin-starred Pidgin, is also on board while Wagamama founder Alan Yau OBE’s Yamabache has signed up to the service too at launch.

Last year, 27,000 people worldwide earned an income selling street papers, making a total of £23.4 million.

Eateries upload surplus food, allowing hungry users to place an order and pick up the grub as a takeaway. It’s predicted Karma could help slash the UK’s 10 million tonnes of food binned every year, and help restaurants reach new customers.

The food app joins the likes of the Real Junk Food Project in its mission to reduce the levels of waste that have seem a third of all food produced globally being unnecessarily thrown away.

Karma co-founder Elsa Bernadotte said:“We are super excited to be live in London and that we already have these fantastic restaurants joining as our exclusive launching partners. The interest has been fantastic from day one and with Londoners being environmentally conscious, great foodies and highly digital in their food shopping, we think it’s a perfect match for a solution like Karma.”